Kenya Dig It? ~ The Adventures of Hundred And Five

[bloodyrosemccoy]

September 19, 2007

 

“So, Amelia, what did you do on your 22^nd birthday?”

Well, I went on a hike through the Indian Ocean.

 

There were a couple of times, when we got to new places, that our Academic Directors sent us out in pairs on scavenger hunts, only we were looking for places, and when we got to Malindi, we did one on my birthday. My friend Thano and I were assigned to go find a small, tourist-oriented town called Watamu and check it out. I was a little apprehensive about my special birthday skirt, but how bad could it be in Watamu?

 

Thano is the kind of guy who can establish instant rapport with pretty much everyone, even when he’s inexplicably fasting for Ramadhan (he’s not Muslim, but he is crazy) and is a little crabby. And we had the added benefit that together, we were the two people whose nicknames are numbers in Swahili: mia means ‘hundred,’ and tano is ‘five,’ so people introducing themselves as Mia and Thano* were pretty funny. We got directions easily, and when we were there we managed to haggle one of the beach boys who appoint themselves your “tour guide” to actually guide us for a fair price.

 

And what we found in Watamu was this:

 

 

God damn. I don’t know if I’ve said this before, but the Indian Ocean is a mindblowing color. It’s teal—a bright, almost fiery clear blue-green that just resonates in my head on some perfect frequency. It’s incredible. And here we were on a postcard beach, the kind you never expect to really exist: blindingly white, no clouds but a few cumulus on the horizon, verdant islands, and that jewel-like color of the water.

 

We had to just stare for a minute.

 

Then we were rudely awakened by a troop of tourists. Malindi and Watamu are overrun with Italians, worse even than cats. And most of them are ugly tourists, in the Ugly American sense. They yell, wear inappropriate clothes, treate the natives like servants, and generally act like boors.** You have to swat them aside like gnats to get anywhere. And they refuse to learn another language.

 

These tourists barged by in their g-strings and Speedos, and broke the spell of the beach a bit. We looked around, wondering what we should do now we were here, and vaguely remembering something we’d heard about a “snake farm.”

 

“Oh, yeah,” said our guide. “It’s that way.” He pointed at a beach, across a small lagoon that had cliffs along its shore.

 

Then he stepped into the lagoon—tide was out, so it was about knee-high in the deep spots. Apparently he decided to go with the shortcut, which happened to be through the ocean.

 

Then he stopped. “Oh, your skirt!”

 

And I, with great aplomb, lifted it up to reveal the shorts I was wearing underneath.

 

So Thano, JJ the beach boy, and I set out across a small area of the Indian Ocean to get to another beach. It was awesome. My Tevas got a bit chewed up, but dammit, my skirt didn’t even get wet, and the water was nice.

 

Less nice was after we got on the beach and the fine white sand began to clump to my feet and shoes. I cannot stand things on my skin. I kept rinsing in the ocean, but when we left the beach and began walking past the walled rich people houses, it really started to drive me nuts.

 

Presently, on a little lane between garden walls, I called for a halt. I was pulling out my water bottle to rinse my feet when the door in the wall behind us flew open and a man was staring out.

 

“Oh!” I said, jumping back.  “Sorry!  I was just … my shoes … uh, viatu—”

 

JJ stepped forward and spoke for a few minutes in Swahili to the guy, holding up my sandals. The man took them, and to my surprise, vanished into the wall again.

 

I blinked at Thano. “My shoes are gone.”

 

Moments later the man returned, with a little basin and pitcher to wash my shoes and my feet both. “Whoa,” I said. “Thanks!”  And since the path was no longer sandy, this time they stayed clean.

 

The snake farm was too expensive for us, so we took a picture of the tiny crocodiles out front and left.  By this time Thano was regretting fasting, but he still did while I remorselessly ate a mysterious chicken part at a nice little restaurant.  “You are going to die,” I told him.

 

He shrugged. “I just need to nap until sunset.”

 

Which, when we got back, he did—nap, that is, not die. The ADs got me a cake with “HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMILIA” on it, and the others, in a wonderful misguided attempt to make me happy, took me clubbing. But definitely one of my more memorable birthdays, and the ocean hike was wonderful.

 

Especially I did manage to pause halfway along, lift a fist, and shout “ARR!” and Thano responded.  Because birthdays should be celebrated with style.

 

 

*Nobody can pronounce Amelia for some reason. And don’t even ask about somebody whose full name is Athanasios.

 

**And they never, ever look happy. I never did find a tourist who didn’t look like they really needed to have a good bowel movement. Why the hell are you going to come halfway around the world to be a grumpy jerk? Are you that determined?

Comments

[cjtremlett.livejournal.com]

That rocks. Gorgeous picture, and the story is great! You'll be telling that one for a while!

[chibicharibdys.livejournal.com]

Awesome!

>> I don’t know if I’ve said this before, but the Indian Ocean is a mindblowing color.

The Pacific Ocean around these islands is as well. Sometimes I just want to go out to the ocean and stare at it for a long time.

Merry Christmas!

[killabee886.livejournal.com]

Malindi and Watamu are overrun with Italians, worse even than cats.

ugh. Don't even get me started with the Italians. Studying in Ireland, there were groups of Italian students that made me want to kill them all. I don't know when Americans got the reputation of being bad tourists, but they must have been Italian Americans.

The beach looks lovely btw.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

So many things to say about this post ... let's see, I'll just go from the top down:

1) I thought your name sounded Indian. Where are you from? My partner and I like to cook Indian cuisine so we've picked up some of the culture along the way.

2) That picture of the beach is astounding! Thank you so much for sharing. The only water I've seen in those colors has been in hot springs at Yellowstone National Park.

3) Yes, tourists can be obnoxious. I'm intrigued to hear that Italians can be as horrid as Americans. The times I visited Mexico and Russia, I was stuck with American company. But it was kind of amusing to watch the doubletakes as I ruthlessly exercised my petite grasp of the local languages. *chuckle* Including the six or so words of Georgian I managed to learn in Tblisi before the Russian tour guide came downstairs and freaked. I think the Georgians would've kept me if they could: apparently I was the only person who'd ever arrived from outside and shown an interest in their language. One of these days I'll find some Georgian-language resources.

4) Happy birthday!

5) People who can travel that far have plenty of money. I'm developing a theory that having too much money tends to magnify the obnoxious aspects of people's personality. It's not an absolute, but it's a definite blip in the statistical probabilities.

Re: Thoughts

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

1. *grin* I'm actually a Western-European-background mutt, and I think Amelia's Latin or Germanic--but I used to call myself "Mia" when I was a baby, so it became my nickname, and it's just a coincidence that it means "hundred" in Swahili. My username, however, is a word derived from Sanskrit term for the color of a lotus blossom; a padparadscha is a pinkish-orange sapphire.

2. It really did seem reminiscent of a paintpot. Damn, now I want to go back to Yellowstone ...

3. That's the way to do it! You sound like me--the language is as important as the rest of the tourism. And I did surprise quite a few people by replying to them in Swahili!

4. Thanks--I'll take birthday greetings at any time! This has been a bit of a Schroedinger's blog and will be for a little while longer; I was in Kenya from September to just last week, and for much of that time I abandoned this blog. So I'm posting my journal entries from the last four months AND doing modern stuff at the same time. I've marked all the Kenyan entries with the "Kenya Dig It?" title, though, which should help, anyway.

5. Yeah, I learned that working in a fancy clothing store. ;)

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

I've always been fascinated with the different colors of sapphires. I don't care much for the blue-black ones, but pinks and yellows are lovely. My mother has a "white" (clear) sapphire ring.

I have a Swahili phrasebook around here somewhere, I think. I bought it for an alien language I was working on.

"Kenya Dig It" ... cool!

The creepy thing is when they pass it on to their children, *on purpose*. A friend of mine who is a hairdresser told a horror story at Yule, about this rich brat who wanted her hair put up for prom, in a style that was physically impossible for the hair she had. The truly horrifying thing is that she called her mother, who not only encouraged this behavior, but said, "You are not to get out of that chair until he makes you happy." He told us that was when he realized he couldn't fix what was wrong with the girl, because it had more to do with her than her hair. I said, "I could, but I'd be using the hairbrush on her other end."

Re: Thoughts

[queenlyzard.livejournal.com]

*giggles* I like that story.

As to the OP, I am *drooooling* over that beach picture. Wow. And I thought the water in the Bahamas was unrealistically beautiful! *sigh... has a sudden desire to be very rich so I afford to take vacations and can go places like this*

[(Anonymous)]

Wooow. That's gorgeous. Hawaii's waters had a beautiful aqua tone to them, but the rock formations really make that beach stand out to me. I love the color of the sand, too. Gosh, you really are lucky to have seen all that. I think a bought of malaria was worth what you saw. I don't really know, though. You had it, not I. ;)

Is that sea foam? Even that is beautiful.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Yup. Totally worth it.

But you'll have to tell me about Hawai'i! I'm excited!

[childthursday.livejournal.com]

Lovely, lovely pictures. Lovely story, too. I love reading about your trip!

I am curious - how many people in Kenya speak English? or are you so good with Swahili that you could communicate properly that way?

Also, random question, oh language person - how do you pronounce a word that has an exclamation point in front? Like !Kung? It's in one of my textbooks and driving me nuts.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

English is one of the official languages of Kenya. Most people speak it, but they learn it at school, so it's got that odd dichotomy of hypercorrect formal grammar and a second-language incompetence going. But it's always fun to speak Swahili to people, and a few need it!

However, no one speaks Italian. But then, Kenya WAS a British colony.

And now it's time for Ask Mister Language Person:

The ! is a click--set your tongue just back from the point where the roof of your mouth swells and click it. (That's an alveolar click, if you want to get technical.) The !Kung language and its relatives are famous for clicks; they've got a ton of different types, but if you haven't been around clicking languages they all sound pretty much the same--and they actually sound like they're coming from somewhere else while people are talking.

What's the context the !Kung are in? I'd be interested to know what you're reading about them ...

[childthursday.livejournal.com]

It was a reference in the The Gendered Society by Kimmel. He's pointing out that the "peaceful" !Kung bushmen described by Eisler actually have a murder rate that exceeds Detroit's. The particular chapter is describing different forms of gender construction.